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The Mean Streets of the Global Village: Crimes of
Exclusion in the United States and Darfur
John Hagan a; Wenona Rymond-Richmond b
a
Northwestern University, American Bar Foundation, Evanston, Illinois
b
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts
Online Publication Date: 01 January 2007
To cite this Article: Hagan, John and Rymond-Richmond, Wenona (2007) 'The Mean
Streets of the Global Village: Crimes of Exclusion in the United States and Darfur',
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 8:1, 54 - 80
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The Mean Streets of the Global
Village: Crimes of Exclusion in the
United States and Darfur
JOHN HAGAN1 AND WENONA RYMOND-RICHMOND2
1
2
Northwestern University, American Bar Foundation, Evanston, Illinois, USA
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
Abstract
This paper considers similarities
as well as differences in statebased systems of selective exclusion found in the United States
and Sudan. Albeit in different
ways and to different degrees,
large numbers of homeless adults
and children are denied the basic
human right to secure shelter in
the nations of both the Global
North and the Global South.
Homelessness and imprisonment
are pervasive forms of social
exclusion in the late modern
Global North, while forced
migration and mortality are persistent forms of social exclusion
in the contemporary Global
South. The domestic policies of
exclusion in the North—with
their legalized use of arrest, due
process, conviction, incarceration and homelessness—are a
world apart from the policies of
criminal exclusion in the Global
South—with their death squads,
militias, disappearances and displacements. Yet both depend on
repression rather than restoration. Mass incarceration and
genocidal death and displacement display an awkward symmetry along the mean streets of
the global village, and the fragile
The Global North and South
Should it be entirely surprising that a
country, the United States, with a
history of importing African slaves and
genocidally killing and displacing its
indigenous people, would four centuries
later respond in ambivalent ways to an
African country, Sudan, that has
enslaved, killed and displaced its own
indigenous population? Perhaps these
countries are not as entirely different as
they might at first seem. There may be
lessons of broader relevance in the
seemingly disconnected but in some
ways similar and overlapping experiences of the United States and Sudan.
Criminology is an important venue for
the development of such lessons.
54
DOI: 10.1080/14043850701695049
and disrupted families of the
North parallel the destroyed
and displaced families of the
South. They are parallel faces
of vulnerability. The mean
streets of the United States and
Sudan are not the same, but their
risks and vulnerabilities involve
parallel and failed policies of
punishment, repression, and
exclusion.
key
words:
Displacement,
Darfur, Exclusion, Genocide,
Homelessness,
Imprisonment,
Killing, Mortality, Rape, Sudan
Our starting point is two jarringly
different images of the consequences of
Sudan’s recent genocidal history. The
first image is the well told story in
Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk’s documentary, The Lost Boys of Sudan, and in
Dave Eggers’ novel What Is What. This
is the true tale of the thousands of young
boys who when confronted with terrifying choices in the early 1990s between
being child soldiers, slaves, and death,
chose to flee from southern Sudan to
refugee camps in Ethiopia. When life
proved desperate there too, many of
these same youth fled back through the
still raging killing fields of southern
Sudan, winding up in refugee camps in
Kenya. Finally, in 2000, the US governJournal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
ISSN 1404–3858 Vol 8, pp 54–80, 2007
# Taylor & Francis
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
Figure 1. Lost Boys of Sudan (www.lostboysfilm.com).
ment began bringing some of these
youth to the United States where they
received help, often from church groups,
in negotiating a challenging inclusion
and reintegration into more normal lives
in the Global North (Cheadle and
Prendergast 2007). This outcome was an
enormously important accomplishment
of restorative justice for the fortunate
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
few who survived their early lives as child
victims and soldiers in Sudan.
The second image is a less uplifting
and more sobering reflection of the
exclusionary stigma and punitiveness
that more often has confronted refugees
from Sudan’s genocidal policies. This
second image appeared in a colour
photo ‘above the fold’ on the front page
55
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
Figure 2. One Sudanese refugee, left, crying out as he was grabbed by riot policemen, as another, right,
tried to hand over his child through a bus window after both were arrested by Egyptian security troops.
(New York Times December 31, 2005) Courtesy of AP Images/Ben Curtis.
of the New York Times, on New Year’s
eve, 2005. The picture was of a Sudanese
man crying out as another man tried to
deliver his infant child to safety through
a bus window as they were forcibly
removed by Egyptian police from a
protest in Cairo. The police killed at
least 23 adults and children that day,
when hundreds of Sudanese refugees
refused to leave a public park they had
occupied to protest denials of their
refugee claims by United Nations officials. The officials implausibly told
thousands of Sudanese camped in the
small park across from their offices that
they were ineligible for relocation
because it was safe to return to their
‘homes’ in Sudan.
When the officers charged, women
and children tried to huddle together,
56
and to hide under blankets as some
men grabbed for anything—tree
limbs, metal bars—struggling to fight
back, witnesses said. The police hesitated, then rushed in with full force,
trampling over people and dragging
the Sudanese off to waiting buses…
(Allam and Slackman 2005:1)
Those who survived were bused away
and later released on the streets of Cairo
with no possessions and nowhere to go
(Allam and Slackman 2005)—yet again
the victims of social exclusion.
No reports followed as to what
became of the latter group of refugee
claimants and their children, but it is
reasonable to imagine that their fates on
the streets of Cairo were far less
favourable than those of the lost boys
of Sudan who were allowed sanctuary in
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
the United States. Of course, the Global
North has its own problems of social
exclusion, notably including homelessness and imprisonment, and the field of
criminology has copiously researched
the life course outcomes of young as
well as older persons who are treated
with analogously punitive (e.g. arrest
and imprisonment) as opposed to reintegrative policies (e.g. shelters, alternative
school and work programs) in North
America. We can learn much from this
criminological research in the Global
North, and we argue in this paper
that the implications of this work
are instructive for our understanding
of the Global South as well as the
Global North—not just because our
fates are linked by the shrinking and
interconnected dimensions of the joined
worlds in which we live, but also
because even more fundamental aspects
of our geographically separate lives may
be more intertwined than they ordinarily
seem.
In particular, we argue that there
are lessons from the experiences of
homeless youth and families in the
Global North that can make the
Global South, including the life prospects of the displaced and dispossessed
in Darfur, more understandable. This
paper ultimately considers similarities as
well as differences in the state-based
systems of selective exclusion found in
the United States and Sudan. Readers
may wish to jump ahead to Table I
below for a summary statement of where
this discussion is heading. Our discussion begins with a more broadly based
comparison of policies of social exclusion in the Global North and Global
South.
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
The criminology of two hemispheres
Albeit in different ways and to different
degrees, large numbers of homeless
adults and children are denied the basic
human right to secure shelter in the
nations of both the Global North and
the Global South. For some, this form of
social exclusion is a cause of involvement in crime, while for others it is a
form of criminal victimization in itself.
For many, it is both. Homelessness and
imprisonment are pervasive institutions
of social exclusion in the late modern
Global North, while forced migration
and mortality are persistent institutions
of social exclusion in the contemporary
Global South. We have already seen that
the shrinking dimensions of world history and worldwide population shifts
interconnect these institutional trends,
often yielding conflict, as when the feardriven exclusivity of the North pushes
back against the successive waves of
forced displacement and pleas for sanctuary from the South. These hemispheric
processes beg for comparative research
and understanding, and criminological
theory and research can speak to this
need.
Major contributions of late modern
criminology speak in useful ways to the
themes of social exclusion and inclusion
that we explore in this paper. Any
accounting is highly selective, but brief
mention of some of the most notable
contributions of recent recipients of the
Stockholm Prize in Criminology can
help to make this basic point. For
example, John Braithwaite (1987, 2002)
explains how stigmatic social exclusion
and more inclusive and reintegrative
shaming policies can characterize opposing regimes of punishment and strongly
57
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
influence the life paths of those who
experience them. Alfred Blumstein
(2006) explains how an exclusionary
period of escalating imprisonment and
confinement of young, black males
linked to a perceived drug epidemic in
the United States has prolonged the
challenge of encouraging desistance
from lifelong criminal careers. Losel
and Schumucker (2005) explains how
social cognitive treatment programs in
community settings can reduce persistent criminality. Moffit (1993) explains
how adolescent-limited involvements in
antisocial behaviour followed by social
reintegration and inclusion can be distinguished from life course persistence in
antisocial behaviour and its exclusionary
developmental consequences.
This contemporary criminology builds
further on the shoulders of giants. For
example, when we elaborate the developmental concept of antisocial behaviour
with Robert Merton’s classic sociological
typology that highlights ‘innovation’ and
‘rebellion’ as forms of criminalized
deviance, we have the foundations of a
late modern criminology that has much
to tell us about the causes and consequences of not only the street crimes of
the Global North, but also about crimes
against humanity and the responses they
provoke in the Global South. What we
have learned in the North can tell us
much about the South, while the lessons
of the South may also be consequential
for the North, if only partly as a result of
the forces of displacement and immigration already noted.
We begin in the more familiar terrain
of North American criminology, before
returning to the urgency of current
lessons from the Darfur region of
58
Sudan. We review research indicating
that reintegrative and restorative justice
policies providing shelter and assistance
are successful in limiting life course
persistence in delinquency and crime.
Alternatively, comparative research
reveals more punitive and stigmatic
policies are more likely to produce
enduring criminal careers. Yet leading
late modern states in the Global North,
such as the United States and Great
Britain, have trended toward increasingly punitive and stigmatizing justice
system policies (Garland 2001). These
are policies of legalized social exclusion.
We consider new evidence that the
collateral intergenerational consequences
of this kind of institutionalized legal
exclusion of parents are to increase
family disruption, homelessness, educational detainment, delinquency and crime
(Foster and Hagan 2007). We argue that
underwriting all of this are distinctive
alternative collective framings of groups,
such as the homeless and displaced, in
exclusive as contrasted with inclusive
terms. The difference is as distinctive as
the alternative collective framings in the
nations of the Global North of ‘street
youth who can be helped’ and ‘street
criminals who must be punished’.
If trends in the Global South are
especially dire, they are foreshadowed
by the often downward trending experiences of the Global North. The challenge is to see the countertrends in what
otherwise too often seems an accelerating downward descent. Out of this
mixed story comes a rich research
agenda for a changing criminology,
including a better understanding of some
of the most desperate criminality of the
Global South.
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
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Street youth and street criminals in three
cities
Two cities in the Canadian Global
North, Toronto and Vancouver,
adopted contrasting inclusive and exclusive policies in relation to homeless
youth in the 1980s and 90s. The result
was a research opportunity for the first
author of this book to consider how
alternative policies of inclusion and
exclusion impact on homeless youth
and street crime in the late modern
urban settings of the Global North
(Hagan and McCarthy 1997). A further
study undertaken at the turn of the
millennium in Glasgow, Scotland
(Fitzpatrick 2000), provides a subsequent opportunity to confirm and
extend some of the findings of the
Canadian research—many thousands of
miles away in another part of the Global
North. We begin with Toronto and
Vancouver.
On the one hand, Toronto had many
features of an inclusive and restorative
social welfare model that framed youth
living on the streets and away from
home in the developmental vernacular of
‘street youth’ or ‘street kids’. In
Toronto, provincial legislation allowed
youth who lived apart from their
families and without parental consent
to receive emergency and longer-term
public shelter and financial assistance.
Thus in the 1990s, there were four
hostels in Toronto reserved exclusively
for youth aged 16 through 21. Although
these hostels had their problems, and
some youth preferred to live on the
streets, most youth clearly valued the
shelter and other services provided by
these youth-oriented settings.
The situation in Vancouver was far
different. Vancouverites worried about
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
the enticements of their city’s mild
climate and unique coastal location.
They foresaw security threats in an
unceasing onslaught of westward
migration. In the 1990s, the province
and city’s welfare policies were restrictive and exclusionary. Family and
welfare legislation required that youth
living apart from their families in
Vancouver could only receive publicly
funded support in unusual circumstances. Care providers could only offer
shelter to youth if they first had
parental permission to be away from
home—an unrealistic precondition for
youth in violent conflict and often
hundreds or even thousands of miles
away from their parents. Beyond this,
authorities in Vancouver refused to
implement a framing of ‘street youth’
that was separate and apart from ‘street
criminals’. Thus in the 1990s, there was
no developed system of hostels, shelters, or safe houses for the short-term
housing of homeless youth in
Vancouver. Very few settings provided
support for these youth on the street.
They were stigmatized as ‘ordinary
street criminals’ and socially excluded.
The situation in Vancouver made the
police the first responders to homeless
youth. The police responded either by
returning youth to their families, who
were liable to criminal prosecution if
they refused to accept and promise to
support their children; or by placing the
youth in government care and sending
them to a foster or group home; or by
preemptively arresting and jailing these
youth. These options did not offer
promising solutions to problems that
caused these youth to leave their homes
in the first place.
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
Our panel survey interviews with the
youth in the two cities confirmed that the
settings and alternative policy models
made a difference. This was reflected
most clearly by a strong effect of being in
Vancouver as contrasted with Toronto
on involvement in crimes of theft, drugs,
and prostitution. The results further
highlighted another key difference in
outcomes between these cities, one that
further diminished involvement in street
crimes in Toronto. Toronto’s inclusive
social welfare model of providing access
to overnight shelters and social services
reduced exposures to the criminal opportunities of street crime networks and
subcultures, whereas Vancouver’s exclusionary crime control model and absence
of assistance made these exposures more
common. Heightened exposure to the
street and its criminal opportunities
intensified a movement toward the fulfillment of criminalized expectations,
including embeddedness of these youth
within criminal networks and without
legally employed peers (Hagan 1993).
Vancouver youth were also more likely
to be charged by the police for their
involvement in street crime, which is, of
course, also consistent with an exclusionary crime control model, a framing as
street criminals, and inconsistent with
getting and keeping jobs.
More generally, the direct and indirect
effects of taking to the streets in
Toronto’s
more
inclusively
and
Vancouver’s more exclusively framed
policy settings illustrate the significant
roles that macrolevel policies play in
determining life outcomes. Inclusive and
exclusionary framings and their connected policies can determine life paths
that lead further into or away from the
60
criminally networked subcultures of the
streets that pervade cities of the Global
North.
Confidence in the preceding conclusion is increased by a fascinating yearlong intensive study of the lives of
homeless youth across the Atlantic on
the streets of Glasgow, Scotland
(Fitzpatrick 2000). By the year’s end,
this ethnographic field study confirmed
that those youth who avoided the
‘homeless subcultures’ of city centres
and stayed in youth-specific (‘street kid’)
shelters were also able to take advantage
of social services and achieve better
employment outcomes. These latter
youth who participated in the specialized programs designed to reintegrate
them into work and school programs
and to reframe them as conventional
adolescents were better able to avoid the
‘downward spiral’ experienced by youth
who remained outside this sphere in
adult-dominated hostels. The latter
youth spent much of their time hanging
out on street corners with other homeless youth who saw themselves and were
seen by others as street criminals.
From North to South
What can the street experiences of
homeless youth in the Global North tell
us about the Global South? In the Global
South, late modern economic policies
imported from the Global North often
combine with the strengths and weaknesses of local nation states in ways that
threaten family survival and intensify
youth problems. Latin and South
America are sites of prodigious homelessness yielding corresponding levels of
family disruption and heightened risk
behaviour among young people, who as
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
in the Global North are most often seen
as street criminals. Also as in the Global
North, the latter problems peak in late
adolescence and early adulthood.
Of course, some Latin and South
American as well as African nations are
also victims of direct forms of social
exclusion, including state-led military
and paramilitary regimes that organize
massive ‘disappearances’ as well as fullfledged massacres, resulting in even more
extensive family displacement and
destruction. Sub-Saharan Africa is today
the epicentre of such one-sided, state-led
violence against civilians and families.
The Middle East and North Africa are
also sites of surges in multisided violence
against civilians (Liu Institute for Global
Issues 2006:Chapter 2). Rebellion against
these circumstances is a predictable result,
and again the demography of age and
crime informs the shape and form of this
rebellion. Darfur, of course, is our focus.
The challenge of the remainder of this
paper is to use new evidence from
selected sites in Darfur to illustrate the
range of consequences that assaults on
the lives of African youth and their
families are creating for current and
future generations. There are, of course,
differences of kind as well as degree
between the experience of genocidal
victimization in Darfur and the problems of youth in the Global North that
we have thus far emphasized. Yet related
life course challenges exist for high-risk
youth throughout the world (Osgood et
al. 2005). Our argument is that these
separate but related problems of youth
present an urgent new research agenda
that underlines the need for a reconstituted and more internationally focused
science of crime.
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
To introduce as well as provoke this
new research agenda, we present in
Table I a comparative snapshot of
similarities as well as differences in the
state-based systems of selective exclusion we argue characterize the US and
Sudan. We acknowledge that other
countries should be included in this
comparison. For example, China probably should occupy a place in this figure
between the US and Sudan, while
Canada and many European countries
are likely to be to the left of the US.
Elaborations of this figure await further
research. We focus first on the US and
Sudan.
Racial selectivity is a pervasive feature
of both the US and Sudan state-based
systems of exclusion. Polarized racial
images are prominent in both countries,
resulting in practices of differentiation if
not oppression. For example, the New
York Times columnist Bob Herbert
(2007) recently observed that in the
United States ‘No one is paying much
attention, but parts of New York City
are like a police state for young men,
women, and children who happen to be
black or Hispanic. They are routinely
stopped, searched, harassed, intimidated, humiliated, and, in many cases,
arrested for no good reason’. Of course,
Herbert qualified his observation by
drawing ‘likeness’ and not ‘equivalence’
between the US and police states elsewhere.
Selective practices characteristically
are implemented indirectly in the US
and directly in Darfur, which can be a
crucial difference. Thus in the United
States, racial differentiation is customarily legalized through recourse to juridical procedures, which may or may not
61
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Table I. State-based systems of selective exclusion (institutionalized forms of removal and
relocation)
Example states:
United States
Exclusionary method:
Selection mechanism:
Institutional authority:
Indirect
Racial differentiation
Legal/juridical procedure
Operational mode:
Putative rights and
protections:
Individualized
Domestic constitutional,
civil, and criminal law
Forms of exclusion:
Police harassment, Arrest
and conviction; Incarceration;
Homelessness;
Disenfranchisement;
Death penalty
Crime as war (‘war
on drugs’)
Criminal innovation,
recidivism, and mass
incarceration
(street crimes)
Theoretical metaphors:
Predictable
consequences:
prove to be discriminatory in themselves. The Sudanese state organizes
racial oppression more visibly and
directly in Darfur: through the
unchecked command chains of the polity
and military and paramilitary forces.
This difference implies individualized
punishment in the US and collective
punishment in Darfur. However, both
forms of punishment create collateral
consequences (Hagan and Dinovitzer
1999) .
Ideally, there should be checks on
practices of racial differentiation. Of
course, these due process checks and
procedures depend on the enforcement
of domestic constitutional, civil, and
criminal law protections in the US, while
62
Sudan
Direct
Racial oppression
Political/military and
paramilitary chain of
command
Collectivized
International
humanitarian and
criminal law
Mass killings and rapes;
Displacement;
Deportation; Property
loss; Refugee status
War as crime (genocide)
Organized attacks, armed
rebellion, and
counterinsurgency
(war crimes)
in Darfur there is (thus far) an ineffective
reliance on international humanitarian
and criminal law. Organizations like the
American Civil Liberties Union and
Human Rights Watch have limited
success in delivering protection in both
places,
but
especially
via
the
International Criminal Court in Darfur.
Weaknesses in legal and other protective measures in both the US and Darfur
result in extensive racial disparities.
These follow in the US from discriminatory practices of police harassment,
arrest, conviction, incarceration, homelessness, and disenfranchisement. The
resulting racial differentiation, including
wrongful convictions, leads to misapplications of the death penalty and massive
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
disproportionality in the incarceration
of African Americans. Meanwhile, the
racial oppression in Darfur is catastrophic. The racial consequences of
the use of the political and military and
paramilitary command structures of the
Sudanese state to organize militia
attacks on African groups in Darfur
are genocidal in scale. The results are
hundreds of thousands of killings and
rapes, displacement, deportation, property loss, and the confinement of millions of homeless Africans in internal
displacement and refugee camps.
These similarities as well as differences in the US and Darfur are reflected
in the parallel policy metaphors describing them respectively in terms of ‘war
against crime’ and ‘war as crime’. In the
US, the crime metaphor is intermittent
but often explicit, and is expressed in
such policies as the ‘war on drugs’,
which had its modern beginning in the
Goldwater US Presidential campaign of
1964 and was implemented in the Nixon
Administration in the 1970s. Ironically,
it is the Bush Administration which has
extended the crime metaphor to Darfur
with an ambivalent labelling of this
armed conflict as genocide and an
abstention from the UN’s referral of
the Darfur case to the International
Criminal Court.
Our thesis is that these wars of
exclusion in both the US and Darfur
have enormously harmful and predictable consequences. In the US, Blumstein
(2006) has explained how the massive
reliance on incarceration in a ‘war on
drugs’ against the crack epidemic in
the 1980s resulted in the exclusionary
imprisonment of older gang leaders and
the creation of vacancy chains for new
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
recruits to meet continuing demands for
drugs. The vacancies were filled by not
only new but younger and characteristically more violence-prone recruits who
set off spiralling increases in gun deaths
and subsequent surges in imprisonment
in the US. This produced the worst of
several possibilities: an age-based and
network-fed subcultural process in
which mass incarceration led to more
violent forms of crime through the 1980s
and into the early 1990s.
As we see next, an exclusionary
process with some notable parallels is
at work in Darfur—in this case involving state-led and -supported violent
attacks on African groups that have
intensified an armed rebellion that
features the young male children of the
targeted victims. In the same sense that
mass incarceration aggravated a surge in
violent youth crime in the US, in Darfur
military and paramilitary attacks are
intensifying an armed rebellion among
newer and younger recruits. Again, this
is an age-based and network-fed subcultural process in which exclusion is
leading to more violence, in this case
armed rebellion. If the past is predictive,
this increasingly youth-driven rebellion
will span war crimes in its own right.
Criminology is experienced in enumerating and explaining such processes of
racial differentiation and violence.
Desperation and defiance in Darfur
Should it be entirely surprising that in a
country with a region like Darfur, where
scorched earth tactics of ethnic cleansing
against African groups are epidemic,
would produce a violent and defiant
rebel movement that is especially attractive to the youth whose families are
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Figure 3. Young rebel soldier in Darfur.
viciously victimized? We argue that this
violent subcultural response is exactly
what should be predicted by a tradition
of labelling and conflict theory in
criminology, including, for example,
Laurence Sherman’s (1993) late modern
version of defiance theory. The more
uplifting alternative prospect, of course,
is the fate of the Lost Boys of Sudan,
with whom we started this paper.
Yet the true tale of the Lost Boys of
Sudan is a restorative story of inclusive
turning points that is even less likely for
the boys of Darfur than are the parallel
probabilities of ghetto youth on the
urban playing fields of America becoming successful professional athletes. As
we demonstrate below, age-related patterns of death and displacement are the
64
far more likely outcomes in Darfur. The
lesson of defiance theory is that rebellion
is too often the more plausible alternative for disadvantaged youth confronted with sobering life choices in the
killing fields of nations as different as
the United States and Sudan.
The larger lesson of defiance theory is
the unanticipated self-perpetuating rage
and rebellion that is the product of
repressive policies in many social settings, especially settings that provide too
few peaceful pathways to success or even
survival. It is in such circumstances that
opportunities and strain theories classically predicted innovation and rebellion.
The age-connected forms of this innovation and rebellion are foreshadowed in
the criminological research already conJournal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
sidered. Again, there may be lessons of
broader relevance in the seemingly
disconnected but in some ways similar
and overlapping experiences of the
United States and Sudan, and criminology is an important venue for the
development of these lessons.
Our starting point is thus a third
image, part myth and part reality, to
consider in juxtaposition to the two we
have already considered in this paper.
This image is of the adolescent and
young adult males in Darfur referred to
in the Sudanese conflict with the demonizing imagery of ‘Tora Bora’. The
Sudanese government has simultaneously identified the Tora Bora with
the history of the Western frontier of the
United States and the American pursuit
of Osama Bin Laden (i.e. into the same
named mountain range on the
Afghanistan border with Pakistan). The
goal of the Sudanese government is to
create the image of a scourge worth
fighting by brutally repressive means.
The Sudanese government in press
releases by its embassies and through
other news media describes the Tora
Bora as armed robbers and smugglers
who prey on the Arab groups in Darfur,
much as in the history of the settlers in
the lawless American West:
Historically, these groups have been
existent in Darfur’s extreme rural
areas for many centuries conducting
acts of highway robbery. The situation here is reminiscent of the 18th
and 19th century American robber…
in the Wild West. The highway
robbery is an ancient practice in
nomadic societies which are not
unique to Darfur. It is to be found in
communities or similar circumstances
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
in different parts of Africa. Groups
such as the Tora Bora… emerged as
new fledglings conducting the old
practice of highway robbery (El
Talib 2004).
Threatening activities of the Tora
Bora are thus said to be an important
source of the self-defense-motivated
actions of the Arab Janjaweed militias.
The argument is that ‘the major function
and the raison d’être for this militia are
to protect herds of nomadic tribes in
western Sudan from attacks of looters,
highway robbery and particularly,
attacks of rival nomadic tribes at times
of conflict on pastures and water’ (El
Talib 2004).
As noted, the Tora Bora also are
linked to Islamic extremism in Sudanese
government news releases. ‘Any study of
the conflict in Darfur’, a government
source reports, ‘can no longer ignore the
clear involvement of Islamic extremists
in fermenting rebellion in western
Sudan’ (El Talib 2004). The evidence
for this assertion, which is refuted
below, again features the Tora Bora
images, noting that ‘amongst the rebels
there is a self-styled ‘‘Tora Bora’’
militia—named after the Afghan mountain range in which Osama Bin Laden,
al-Qaeda, and the Taliban fought one of
their last battles, and from which Bin
Laden escaped American capture’ (AliDinar 2004).
It is true that groups of young rebels
sometimes also describe themselves as
Tora Bora and are a small but growing
part of the Darfur conflict. These youth
are part of the large number of child,
adolescent and young adult soldiers in
Africa. Although young males may
always have fought wars in the largest
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
numbers, they are an increasingly important and vicious part of African armed
conflicts. The reasons are likely little
different than in the Global North,
where youth as well are valued in gangs
for their loyalty, fearlessness, willingness
to take risks and readily renewable
availability as new recruits (Gettleman
2007). Also like gang members in the
Global North, these youth often are
recognizable by their adopted symbols.
In Darfur and elsewhere in Africa, these
menacing images include dreadlocks,
wraparound sunglasses, displays of
weapons and sometimes small leather
pouches worn with string around their
necks and containing good luck pieces.
They often ride into conflict in rocketequipped pickup trucks and gun-laden
land cruisers.
It is important to emphasize the
polarized racial identification of the
Tora Bora in Darfur. There is a clear
linkage between the rising racial polarization of everyday life in Darfur,
represented in the reports of racial
epithets heard during Janjaweed militia
attacks in Darfur. We make this and
related points in the remainder of this
paper by drawing on a survey conducted
by the US State Department with Darfur
refugees in Chad in July and August of
2004 (see Hagan et al. 2005).
Figure 4 presents a summary based on
this survey of the rise in the explicit
expression of racism in Darfur. The
figure presents three-month moving
averages of the reports from Darfur
refugees of hearing racial epithets from
spring–summer 2003 to the same period
in 2004. This was a period of rise and
fall in killings, which peaked at the
beginning of 2004 in Darfur.
66
Figure 4 similarly shows a peak in
reported racial epithets just before a
widely observed peak in killing, at the
end of 2003. However, this figure also
shows that when attacks continued to
occur in 2004, the level of reported racial
epithets remained high, with about 40%
of the respondents hearing these taunts,
compared to about 20% at the beginning
of the time series. We will see below that
the Tora Bora references were nearly
always accompanied by racial epithets
when they were heard during the
attacks. The racial and Tora Bora taunts
are joined expressions of a racial demonology. In classical terms of labelling
and subcultural crime theory, or
Sherman’s defiance theory, the youth
who take on the Tora Bora role are
acting as if to say, ‘we are everything
you say we are, and worse’. They have
adopted what Edwin Lemert (1967)
called the ‘symbolic appurtenances’ of
the demonized cultural frame.
The question is thus less about the
existence or size of these rebel groups
than about the sources and sequences of
their development in settings like Darfur.
There is no doubt that rebel groups such
as the Tora Bora exist and pre-date the
current conflict in Darfur. The most
prominent of the organized rebel groups,
the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the
Justice and Equality Movement (JEM),
announced their existence in February
and March of 2003. The SLA and JEM
rebels joined forces in a seven-hour attack
on the al Fasher air base with 33 land
cruisers in April of 2003, destroying a
number of Sudan air force bombers and
gunships. The rebels killed more than 75
Sudanese soldiers and lost only 9 of their
own. This attack is usually cited as the
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
40%
Racial Epithets
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50%
30%
20%
10%
0%
4/03- 5/03- 6/03- 7/03- 8/03- 9/03- 10/03- 11/03- 12/03- 1/04- 2/04- 3/04- 4/04- 5/046/03 7/03 8/03 9/03 10/03 11/03 12/03 1/04 2/04 3/04 4/04 5/04 6/04 7/04
Date of Attack
Figure 4. Moving average percentage of refugees from Darfur who reported they heard racial epithets
during attacks, by date of departure (Atrocities Documentation Survey, Summer 2004).
beginning of the current conflict (Flint
and de Waal 2005).
Yet the most exhaustive survey of
reported attacks by both sides in Darfur
reveals a very one-sided picture of this
armed conflict, with few although
increasing rebel attacks over time
(Petersen and Tullin 2006). This survey
is based on 178 witness statements/
accounts and reports of attacks involJournal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
ving 372 sites in Darfur from January
2001 to September 2005. Although the
accounting is certainly not exhaustive, it
makes use of all known available
sources. It begins by revealing at least
eight significant attacks on African
villages before the first major rebel
attack on the al Fasher air base in the
spring of 2003. In total, the survey
reveals only 13 attacks by rebel forces
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
(3% of the total). All of the remaining
attacks (97%) were conducted by
Janjaweed militia groups, Sudanese government forces and/or aircraft, or a
combination of these groups. Perhaps
of even greater interest, however, is that
while 3 of the 13 rebel attacks each are
reported in 2003 and 2004, the remaining 7 attacks are reported in 2005. Six
of these seven attacks are reported in
South Darfur, with only one in North
Darfur. It is very doubtful that this
reporting of attacks is comprehensive,
but it may well be representative of the
relative distribution and sequence of the
attacks, with the rebel attacks increasing
over time.
This evidence is consistent with
reports that the numbers of rebels seem
to be growing along with the frequency
of rebel actions, both against Arab
targets and between rebel factions.
This begs the question of who the rebels
are and where they come from. Our
answer is that they are usually the
victims and sometimes also the perpetrators of war crimes, as well as more
common crimes of subsistence. They
come from all the targeted African
groups—most notably the Zaghawa,
Fur and Masaleit. They are mostly
young, and some are under 18. All of
the rebel groups—the SLA, JEM, and
the newer National Movement for
Reform and Development (NMRD) —
are predominately made up of males in
their later teens and twenties. As many
as 80 Fur boys under 18 are known to
have been in the ranks of the SLA and
have been seen with weapons by Human
Rights Watch observers (Human Rights
Watch 2004a). Sudan is a ratified
signatory to the Optional Protocol to
68
the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, which established 18 as the
minimum age for forced recruitment
and calls on states to assist with the
rehabilitation of child soldiers.
Yet any thoughts of rehabilitation or
restorative justice ignores the reality that
the Sudan government’s strategy of
counterinsurgency in Darfur is a policy
of collective stigmatization and exclusionary punishment concentrated on the
families of the African farmers and
villagers who are the targets of the
joined government and Janjaweed militia attacks. An important Human Rights
Watch (2005) report uses the term
collective punishment to aptly describe
the brutality we further describe below
in the southwestern part of West Darfur
state:
These tactics—which were replicated
throughout much of Darfur—were
supplemented by other particularly
brutal crimes in three Wadi Saleh,
Mukjar, and Shattaya localities as a
form of collective punishment—and
total subjugation—of the civilian
population for its perceived support
of the rebel movement (Human Rights
Watch 2005: 11).
Understanding the nature and dimensions of this collective punishment
requires a further look at the pattern of
victimization associated with the rebellion in Darfur. A key to understanding
the consequences of collective punishment as a counterinsurgency strategy
involves seeing its impact on families.
The collective punishment of families in
West Darfur
An important way of understanding the
impact of the counterinsurgency policy
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Table II. Darfur families before and after attacks (Atrocities Documentation Survey, Chad,
2004)
Settlement
Percent
Average family
size before
Average number males
killed
attacks
of family killed
Percent Average family
size after
reporting
attacks
rapes
Abu Gumra
Al Genina
Beida
Bendesi
Foro Burunga
Garsila
Habila
Kabkabiyah
Karnoi
Koulbous
Kutum
Masteri
Seleya
Sirba
Tine
Umm Bourou
Near Karnoi
Adar
Tandubayah
Near Tine
Girgira
Near Abu Gumra
25.66
9.29
22.62
6.75
6.68
6.81
8.63
8.63
17.88
8.39
7.51
9.59
7.79
7.23
7.13
8.66
8.56
10.06
6.59
9.33
8.44
7.76
19.94
2.43
16.31
2.19
1.44
1.44
2.15
2.18
11.68
1.23
2.44
2.33
1.37
1.13
1.13
2.69
2.44
3.88
0.65
1.87
1.06
2.12
56
87
55
92
78
96
90
95
64
94
79
76
87
89
97
77
87
76
72
86
53
91
20
45
14
38
41
38
41
33
31
0
26
47
27
29
22
27
23
35
6
0
0
12
5.71
6.86
6.31
4.56
5.24
5.38
6.48
6.45
6.21
7.15
5.07
7.22
6.43
6.10
6.00
5.96
6.13
6.18
5.94
7.47
7.38
5.64
Total
10.44
4.19
69
29
6.25
of the Sudanese government in Darfur is
to reconstruct the numerical changes in
family composition and how they have
occurred as a result of attacks on farms
and villages. We do this first by looking
at all 22 settlements represented by the
932 refugees interviewed in the State
Department Survey in Chad. Table II
provides a before and after picture of the
average families in these settlements, in
terms of their mean size, loss of life and
experiences of rape over the 18 months
before the 2004 survey.
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
This table indicates that across the 22
settlements, the average family size
before the attacks included more than
ten persons (10.44). By the time these
families reached the refugee camps in
Chad, however, they consisted of just
over six persons (6.25)—having lost on
average more than four family members
(4.19). Nearly 70% of these lost family
members were males (69.2%), while
nearly 30% of the respondents (29.1%)
reported that rapes occurred during the
attacks. These latter numbers reflect a
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
pervasive pattern of killing men and
raping women. The averages are influenced by especially high numbers of
reported lost family members in several
settlements, most notably Abu Gumra,
Beida and Karnoi. For unknown
reasons, these settlements which report
the highest numbers of lost family
members report somewhat lower rates
of rape.
The best documentation of the patterns of death, disappearances and
destruction in Darfur is in the southwestern areas of West Darfur known as
Wadi Salih and Mukjar. These are among
the most fertile land areas of Darfur, and
the Mukjar area includes the strategically
important Sindu Hills where rebel forces
have often sought refuge. Four settlements in this region are included in
Table II: Bendesi, Foro Burunga,
Garsila and Habila. Although the
numbers of lost family members are
somewhat lower in this area than elsewhere in Darfur, we will see that the
overall destruction of African group life,
which has led to an increase in rebel
recruitment and activity, is overwhelming. This area thus provides an important
illustration of genocidal victimization
and its consequences in Darfur.
The damage to family life in the about
four settlement clusters included in
Table II shows a consistent pattern. On
average, the family sizes varied between
six and more than eight members (6.68
to 8.63) before the attacks. Families on
average lost from about one to two
members (1.44 to 2.19), so that after the
attacks the average family ranged in size
from about four to six members (4.56 to
6.48). About 40% of the respondents
from these families reported that rapes
70
occurred during the attacks on their
settlements (38%–41%). Three of the
four settlements reported that more than
90% of the lost family members were
male, while the fourth settlement
reported that 78% of those lost were
male. Thus the loss of family members
was pervasive, and the direct or indirect
experience of rape was extensive.
However, the narrative accounts we
consider next make it even more clear
how devastatingly comprehensive the
destruction of group life was in this
southwestern area of West Darfur.
The destruction of Bendesi
The town of Bendesi is an instructive
example of genocidal victimization in
the southern part of West Darfur.
Except where otherwise indicated, the
quoted interviews come from the US
State Department survey referenced and
described above (see also Hagan et al.
2005).
Tensions grew between Arab herders
and African farmers for at least two
years before intense violence broke out
in this Wadi Salih locality in August of
2003. For example, a refugee interviewed
in Chad reported an early attack on the
village of Kaber, south of Bendesi, in
December of 2002 and several times
thereafter. The attackers were Arab and
dressed in khaki uniforms. An Umdha
(i.e. tribal leader) and several others
were killed, including several children
who were thrown into a nearby river.
The refugee reported that during the
attack ‘they tried to defend themselves,
and when they did they were defeated’.
Four persons were killed and cattle
were taken when Kaber was hit again in
June and in the first days of August
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
2003. A plane dropped bombs on the
village in the 3 August attack. As a
woman fled this attack, she ‘stopped at
my father’s shop and found him dead
and the shop looted. I also saw the body
of my ex-husband. My cousin was shot
too, and died later of the injury’.
Another village, Bamboi, was bombed
and strafed in early July, with the
attacking Janjaweed militia calling their
victims ‘Nuba [Arab for black slave]
dogs’. Another respondent reports two
killings on the road to Bendesi. These
‘pre-attacks’ were taken as warnings,
and the populations of Bendesi and
Mukjar began to swell as farmers and
villagers in smaller centres began to
move toward what they hoped would
be the safety of larger settlements
(Physicians for Human Rights 2006:24).
The population of Bendesi was seven
to ten thousand before widespread
violence broke out in the area. The
vegetation around the town is lush, and
the surrounding region is a fertile growing area. In the past, Arab nomads often
passed through the area and stayed with
their herds near the town of Bendesi.
They frequently were seen in the markets of this and surrounding towns. The
town of Mukjar is located 25 kilometers
to the northeast.
Arab herders have long regarded land
more generally in Darfur as belonging to
Allah, with rights of use and settlement
contingent on mutually advantageous
exchange relationships (de Waal 2006).
From the farming season of approximately July to February, the nomadic
herders traditionally kept their livestock
off the cultivated land and on established migration routes. Farmers in the
Bendesi area complained that Arab
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
herders were increasingly allowing their
livestock to graze on their crops during
the growing season. The effects of
desertification and scarcity of grazing
opportunities likely fueled the growing
tensions. In 2002, a dispute followed an
attempt to negotiate this disagreement
and resulted in the shooting of four
African men. For the next two years,
Arab groups were accused of looting and
shooting African farmers in this area
(Physicians For Human Rights 2006:
23–4).
The African groups of this area—who
are mainly Fur but also Masaleit and
Zaghawa—began to arm and defend
themselves. A resident of Bendesi
remarked that negotiation with the
Arab herders was futile: ‘Anyone who
tried to dispute them was shot… Also
during this time, it became very unsafe
for young women to go outside the
village… Many young women were
beaten and raped and were killed if they
refused’ (Physicians For Human Rights
2006:24). The local African tribes began
to secretly arm and train themselves as a
defense measure. An Umdha (i.e. a
ranking leader in the Fur group)
reported that arms became more readily
available in the area following the civil
war in Chad. Local Tora Bora rebels
reportedly were smuggling them across
the border. These rebels also attacked
the local police and army barracks. In
early August, the SLA attacked and stole
weapons and a radio from the Bendesi
police station, killing two Arab men.
Similar raids occurred in Mukjar and
surrounding villages (Human Rights
Watch 2005:6).
Tension mounted in the early weeks
of August, 2003, as the government
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began to actively recruit local Arabs into
more formally organized militias. There
was a public call for recruits, but only
Arab volunteers were taken, and
Africans were explicitly turned away.
Ali Kushayb, an Arab militia leader
charged with crimes against humanity
by the International Criminal Court, led
this recruitment effort, integrating the
militia members into the structure of the
Public Defense Forces of the region. The
local African groups identified these
militias as Janjaweed, characterizing
them as highwaymen and robbers—the
mirror image of the Sudanese government’s depiction of the Tora Bora.
Ahmed Harun, a middle-level
Sudanese ministerial official responsible
for Darfur and also charged with crimes
against humanity by the International
Criminal Court, was seen on numerous
occasions during this period in the
Bendesi/Mukjar area. The Umdha interviewed in the Chad refugee camp
recalled that ‘I was at a meeting where
he announced that those that disrespected the government should be
cleansed away by the government’. He
reported that ‘the government has a
propaganda program against blacks…
which tries to show that all blacks are
rebels and should be fought’. Harun is
identified in the interviews as the
government architect of the strategy of
collective punishment which held all the
African civilians in the Bendesi area
responsible for the scattered local rebel
attacks on police stations and government installations. Harun used the
analogy that these farmers and villagers
were the ‘water’ in which the rebel ‘fish’
swam and survived (International
Criminal Court 2007).
72
As noted in the Chad State
Department interviews cited above,
smaller villages surrounding Bendesi
were attacked in the first weeks of
August, in a lead-up to the assault on
Bendesi on 15 August, 2003. Reports of
more planned attacks circulated in the
markets and among mothers and children. For example, one woman reported
that ‘I heard about that in the market,
and also from children who heard it
from Arab children while herding. They
were saying, ‘‘We’re going to eliminate
all the Nuba and just leave the trees—
we’ll even eliminate the ants’’
(Physicians for Human Rights 2006:25).
The major government-organized attack
in the Bendesi area began on 15 August,
2003.
Witnesses reported to Court investigators that the Arab militia leader, Ali
Kushayb, was seen leaving Mukjar on 15
August in a vehicle with Janjaweed
militia (International Criminal Court
2007:73). He was seen later the same
day in Bendesi in military uniform and
issuing orders to the Janjaweed. The
Janjaweed arrived at the Umdha’s house
and indicated they would be back later
to collect ‘zakat’—an Islamic tax. A
refugee in Chad from Bendesi recalled
that ‘at 7 a.m., six land cruisers with
mounted guns of the Sudanese military
force arrived and on a loudspeaker
announced that everyone had to bring
their goods and be assessed for taxes in a
central area’. The government troops on
the land cruisers with machine guns
were accompanied by Janjaweed on
horses, camels and on foot. The combined force included more than 500 men.
The
government
troops
and
Janjaweed simply waited an hour or
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
two while the people of Bendesi gathered
with their possessions for ‘tax collection’
and then attacked. The government
soldiers had land vehicles with fixed
machine guns and rockets, while the
Janjaweed attacked on horseback and
camels. As they rode and fired into the
crowd, a refugee remembered they were
shouting ‘Tora Bora’ and ‘we don’t want
any blacks in this area’. This woman
described seeing many people killed and
injured and that as she was fleeing it felt
like she was ‘running on dead bodies’.
This same woman saw a 12-year-old girl
raped by five men in Bendesi. The girl
was abducted and later returned to
Mukjar where the woman saw her
again, now covered in blood. She died
soon after.
Another refugee in Chad from a
village near Bendesi counted 32 persons
killed and that girls were raped,
abducted, and returned days later.
Although some respondents offered
exact counts of persons killed and raped,
others emphasized that the attacks were
too chaotic and terrifying to allow such
counts. A woman observed that ‘they
rode into the village and were screaming
‘‘exterminate the Fur, kill the Fur!’’. It
was total destruction. I saw people dead.
I saw them raping women. But I didn’t
have time to count how many were
killed or raped’ (Physicians for Human
Rights 2006:25).
A sheik said he and other sheiks were
arrested and accused of being Tora
Bora. He described being taken to a
military base and tortured. ‘The conditions were terrible—37 men in a small
room about four by three metres. We
were all lying down, tied up, some on
top of each other.’ He was detained for
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
seven days and heard later that three of
the men died as a result of the torture.
During the attack on his village, a mile
from Bendesi, he heard Janjaweed
shouting ‘kill the Nubas’ and that ‘the
young Fur and Masaleit should be
eradicated’. Many fled from the area of
Bendesi to Mukjar, but to little avail.
For example, a refugee in Chad said ‘we
stayed in Mukjar… but it was very
dangerous for men. I didn’t leave the
house because the soldiers were arresting
and killing many men suspected of being
rebels’.
Respondents consistently recalled hearing a mixture of racial epithets along with
the allegations of being Tora Bora. A
refugee who tried to flee but was caught
in Bendesi described the Janjaweed saying
to him ‘you were at Tora Bora’, which
meant to him that he was from the rebel
group. His captors wanted information
about the sheik and information about
rebels. Another respondent from a nearby
village said he was told he was ‘protective
of the Tora Bora’.
The attack on Bendesi that began on
15 August, continued for five days, and
followed a pattern that was repeated in
many parts of Darfur. After the initial
assault, members of the armed forces
and Janjaweed went through Bendesi in
a door-by-door fashion, searching for
remaining residents and killing those
they found. Then, over the following
days, witnesses described seeing ‘the
attackers divide into three groups: one
burned the village; one collected animals
and broke into houses; and the third
chased the people who were running
away… Witness DFR-023 stated that she
heard the attackers say that they had
been sent ‘‘to kill every black thing
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
except the Laloba and Daylabe trees
which are also black’’ (International
Criminal Court 2007:74).
During this period, and over much of
the next month, rapes and killings
continued. A refugee in Chad was able
to identify over 50 young men who were
shot and killed between 15 August and 8
September in the Bendesi area. All
together, he knew of 229 men who were
killed. Young men were repeatedly
arrested and taken into custody, where
they were often tortured. Ali Kushayb
was prominently involved in the operation of police stations and military bases
for these purposes.
A refugee in Chad also reported more
than 30 girls were abducted and raped
by the Janjaweed in the Bendesi area.
‘Of these, two had their throats slit, one
was strangled, and one was shot when
they resisted being raped.’ He indicated
that Government of Sudan soldiers then
took some of the women to Khartoum
as a form of ‘booty’ and that the
Governor and Deputy Governor of
Mukjar were present during the attacks.
The account of the rapes and the
removal of women to Khartoum is
widely enough known that the al
Bashir government, in a rare intervention, authorized a court inquiry into the
abduction of women and girls from the
villages of Wadi Saleh in 2005 (Winter
2007).
Death, survival, and rebellion
The killing, abductions and the enslavement of children has long been a part of
the conflict in southern Sudan, as noted
in the account of the Lost Boys of Sudan
above. Abductions are a smaller but still
very significant part of the Darfur
74
conflict in western Sudan. To get a
measure of the magnitude of the direct
impact of these crimes on young males
and females in Darfur, we developed a
data file from the State Department
survey with the age and gender of every
nuclear family member identified as
killed or missing in the Chad refugee
sample. We then constructed the population pyramids presented in Figure 5.
This figure makes it clear that two
groups are most likely to be dead and
missing from the families of refugee
families: the ‘fighting-age’ population
of African males between 15 and 29
years of age, and younger pubescent
females between 5 and 14 years of age.
About a third of the former young adult
males as well as the latter preadolescent
girls are dead or missing. This is
consistent with a policy of killing the
fighting-age males while raping and
killing younger females. This is also
consistent with an exclusionary policy
that is likely to intensify rebellion among
victimized groups.
Note that the policy of killing fighting-age males parallels in demographic
terms the earlier pattern we observed of
incarcerating the young adult leaders of
drug gangs in the United States. The
effect of both is to create a vacancy
chain for the recruitment of remaining
younger replacements. The potential
pool of recruits is identified in the
population pyramids presented in
Figure 6 from three internal displacement camps in West Darfur. This figure
displays what demographers call a
‘population bulge’ of adolescent males.
The German demographer Gunnar
Heinsohn (2003) indicates 68 of the most
populous nations of the world have
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
Figure 5. Age and sex distribution of killed and missing household members (Atrocities Documentation
Survey, Darfur 2004).
adolescent bulges that will mature into
‘fighting-age’ bulges, and that 62 of these
68 nations are—or recently have been—
characterized by high levels of violent
mortality. As a result of its high birthrate, Sudan is already among these
nations. In Darfur, this pattern is
intensified by the killing of fighting-age
males. Criminologists, among all others,
are perhaps most sensitive to the violent
potential of these population dynamics.
In the Global North as well as the
Figure 6. Age and sex distribution of surviving household members. Reprinted from The Lancet, Vol.
364 No. 9442, E. Depoortere et al., Violence and Mortality in West Darfur, Sudan (2003–04):
Epidemiological Evidence from Four Survey, p. 1315–1320, Copyright (2004), with permission from
Elsevier.
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
Global South, it is the young who are
most violent and aggressive. However,
they are also sensitive to further aggravating factors we have been describing,
most notably, of course, the killing of
parents and siblings, and the raping of
pubescent girls of approximately the
same ages as the surviving males.
These factors combine to make an
intensified rebellion predictable, with
age-graded networks of recruitment
and subcultural resentments playing
leading roles in focusing the group-based
defiance.
The International Criminal Court
(2007:76) also makes clear that the
raping and killing reflected in these
figures was explicitly linked to issues of
rebels and the demonization of the Tora
Bora. This point is illustrated by the
following witness report described in the
Court Brief:
DFR-023… witnessed a separate incident of rape in which Militia/
Janjaweed and members of the
Armed Forces selected and led away
at least ten females between 15 and 18
years of age. She watched as the girls
were raped in a field nearby… While
carrying out the rapes, the attackers
were saying ‘we have taken Tora
Bora’s wives, praise be to God’. At
least one woman who was raped bled
in the course of the assault. When this
happened the rapists shot their guns
into the air and announced ‘I have
found a virgin woman’ (International
Criminal Court 2007).
Despite the references to Tora Bora,
the Court (78) explicitly indicates that
‘no defense was mounted by the residents, and there was no rebel presence in
the town when it was attacked’. The
76
patterns we have described predict
intensification of a more organized and
youth-fueled rebellion.
Some residents of Bendesi and Mukjar
and other settlements stayed in the
general area in the following months,
hoping that they could salvage some of
their crops and survive this period of
violent collective punishment. Kushayb
and Harun were seen frequently with
their troops in the area. In the fall of
2003, the Arab nomadic groups brought
huge herds of their camels and other
livestock into the area to graze on the
newly available farmlands. This further
undermined the African groups’ hopes
to resettle and reclaim these lands.
Ali Kushayb also undertook a program to systematically eliminate the
leadership of the African groups in the
fall of 2003 and winter of 2004. The
‘educated persons’ and Umdhas and
Sheiks of these groups were taken into
custody and executed. A refugee in Chad
explained that ‘they were told they were
being taken to Garsila but we found
them in a wadi about one half hour
between Mukjar and Garsila. The
bodies were in long lines of 20 to 50….
They had been shot—in the head, back,
and waist’.
The limited number of SLA rebel
forces in the area had by this time
withdrawn into the nearby Sindu Hills.
In February of 2004, the SLA were able
to mount some successful attacks on
government troops and installations.
The government struck back with an
unprecedented show of force:
The SLA’s presence and attacks
prompted a massive response by
Sudanese government forces and militias that targeted civilians and civilian
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
villages. By mid-March, the government’s scorched earth campaign of
ground and air attacks around the
Sindu Hills had removed almost all
existing or perceived support base for
the rebellion by forcibly displacing,
looting, and burning almost every Fur
village near the hills and then extending ‘mopping up operations’ to villages and towns farther away (Human
Rights Watch 2005:11).
At this point, the villages had been
destroyed, and the African groups who
had lived there were gone—either as a
result of being killed or displaced, in
large part to the refugee camps in Chad.
Before and after the government offensives
We have already presented evidence that
in Bendesi and the surrounding area
families lost on average one to two
members. We have also seen that these
losses disproportionately involved young
adult men and teenage girls. This loss of
life occurred in an intensely racial atmosphere that included both the shouting
of racial epithets during the attacks and
claims about membership and support
of the Tora Bora or rebels in the area. A
study of the Bendesi and surrounding
area by ITERSOS (2005), for the United
Humanitarian High Commissioner for
Refugees, provides some final insights
on the impact on families of the attacks.
Of the total number of 245 villages
and towns considered in this research,
about 100 were found to have been
destroyed, with 8 more abandoned but
not destroyed. Furthermore, in most of
the destroyed or abandoned villages,
nomad Arab groups had moved on to
the sites and started to put the land to
use for farming or grazing. This was
Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention
especially true in the Mukjar area (de
Montesquiou 2007).
The families and children displaced by
the government offensives tend to be
living in highly problematic conditions.
Less than 20% of the children who have
survived their ordeal are attending
school. Girls are even less likely to be
doing so than boys. It is estimated that
about 10% of the families are very
conservatively classifiable as ‘vulnerable’
in the whole population of this region.
This figure is estimated at 25%–30%
among the internally displaced. Single
parenthood is the most common vulnerability, with the greater number of these
families headed by a female caring alone
for her children. A social norm known
as ‘zaka’ fostered the reintegration of
vulnerable children and families before
the recent conflict in Darfur. This norm
has lost much of its force and protective
capacity in the current circumstances.
These are among the many and most
disturbing collateral consequences of the
exclusionary armed conflict in Darfur.
The streets of the global village
Is it surprising that there are similarities
as well as differences in the patterns of
legal and criminal exclusion we see in
the streets of the Global North and
South? As distant and foreign as the
streets of Bendesi in West Darfur may
seem, they bear similarities and connections to the everyday world of the
Global North. In revealing ways, they
are as close as the contrasting images of
The Lost Boys of Sudan and the defiant
rebels of Tora Bora. It is not a
coincidence that the faces of the rebel
youth hiding out in the Sindu Hills
nearby Bendesi—with their dreadlocks,
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hagan and richmond: the mean streets of the global village
wraparound sunglasses, and their menacing weapons—look very much like the
indigenous and immigrant youth
increasingly seen on the streets of the
Global North. In the high-speed warp of
late modern electronic technology, the
mean streets of the global village overlap
more closely than we often imagine.
The challenge of joining late modern
domestic and foreign policies is to see
common themes as well as differences.
The domestic policies of exclusion in the
Global North—with their legal forms of
arrest, due process, conviction, and
incarceration—are a world apart from
the policies of criminal exclusion in the
Global South—with their criminal forms
of death squads, militias, disappearances,
and displacements. The individualized
punishments of the North offer some
protection against the collective punishments of the South. One important hope
is that the institutions of international
criminal law can narrow the distance
between these worlds. Yet both are based
on punishment rather than restoration.
They have notable features in common:
the impulses to exclude and repress. The
alternative impulses, to include and support, are elusive notwithstanding the
contrasting faces of the abundance the
Global North and the scarcity of the
Global South. Mass incarceration and
genocidal death and displacement display
an awkward symmetry along the mean
streets of the global village.
The fragile and disrupted families of
the North parallel the destroyed and
displaced families of the South. They are
parallel faces of vulnerability. The mean
streets of Vancouver and Bendesi are not
the same, but their risks and vulnerabilities are joined by parallel and failed
policies of punishment and exclusion.
Their fates are joined by the shrinking
distances between them. The hopeful
faces of The Lost Boys of Sudan are
reassuring but misleading alternatives to
the defiant faces of the rebel youth of
Tora Bora.
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professor john hagan
Northwestern University American Bar Foundation
Department of Sociology
1810 Chicago Avenue
Evanston
Illinois 60201
USA
Tel: +1-847 491-5688
Fax: +1-847 491-9907
Email: j-hagan@northwestern.edu
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Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention